Changes to ocean currents in the Atlantic may cool European weather within a few decades, scientists say.

Researchers from the UK's National Oceanography Centre say currents derived from the Gulf Stream are weakening, bringing less heat north.

Their conclusions, reported in the scientific journal Nature, are based on 50 years of Atlantic observations.

They say that European political leaders need to plan for a future which may be cooler rather than warmer.

The findings come from a British research project called Rapid, which aims to gather evidence relating to potentially fast climatic change in Europe.

Atmospheric radiator

The key is the Gulf Stream. After it emerges from the Caribbean, it splits in two, with one part heading north-east to Europe and the other circulating back through the tropical Atlantic.

As the north-eastern branch flows, it gives off heat to the atmosphere, which in turn warms European land.

The north Atlantic conveyor carries warm water to northern latitudes where it sinks, returning at depth in the ocean.

"It's like a radiator giving its heat to the atmosphere," said Harry Bryden from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) at Britain's Southampton University.

"The heat it gives off is roughly equivalent to the output of a million power stations," he told reporters.

The Rapid team monitored at roughly 25 degrees north

By the time it reaches the northern latitudes around Greenland and Iceland, the water has cooled so much that it sinks towards the ocean floor, a process known as "overturning".

This cooler water heads south, forming the return stream of a conveyor belt. The complete cycle sees warm water coming northwards on the ocean's surface, and the cold water returning hundreds or thousands of metres underwater.

Florida-based scientists monitor the northwards-flowing Gulf Stream, and have found it has remained roughly constant over the last 50 years.

The NOC researchers concentrated on the colder water flowing south; and they found that over the last half century, these currents have changed markedly.

"We saw a 30% decline in the southwards flow of deep cold water," said Harry Bryden.

"And so the summary is that in 2004, we have a larger circulating current [in the tropical Atlantic] and less overturning."

And less heat, then delivered to European shores.

First evidence

Computer models of climate have regularly predicted that the north Atlantic conveyor may well reduce in intensity or even turn off altogether, a concept that was pushed beyond credence in the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow.

What happens is that as Arctic ice melts and Arctic rivers flow faster  trends which have both been documented  the northern oceans become less saline.

Less salinity means a lower density; the waters then cannot sink, so the conveyor weakens.

Computer models have predicted that if it turned off completely, Europe would cool by perhaps four to six degrees Celsius.

Commenting in Nature, Detlef Quadfasel from the University of Hamburg writes that the NOC experiments provide "...the first observational evidence that such a decrease of the oceanic overturning circulation is well underway."

Natural variation

The NOC researchers admit that the case is not yet proven.

The analysis involves only five sets of measurements, made in 1957, 1981, 1992 and 1998 from ships, and in 2004 from a line of research buoys tethered to the ocean floor.

Even if the trend is confirmed by further data, it could be down to natural variability rather than human-induced global temperature change.

Ship's crew prepare for a night-time deployment of equipment.

In 2004 buoys were deployed from ships onto tethers

"The natural cycle had a northern cooling until the mid-1970s and a warming afterwards, and here we see an apparent cooling."

He is also convinced by other details of the NOC measurements showing that the changes in the southerly underwater flow have occurred at great depths.

"The slowing down of the southward return occurs between 3,000 and 5,000m; and this more or less constitutes a smoking gun," he said.

Choosing policies

So what does all this mean for European weather? Will it necessarily get colder  or will the apparent recent trend of warmer summers continue?

"If this trend persists," said Harry Bryden, "we will see a temperature change in northern latitudes, perhaps of a degree Celsius over a couple of decades."

"This issue of variability is very important," said Harry Bryden, "and we do not have any good grasp of it.

"Models can predict it, but we think we ought to go out and measure it."

Michael Schlesinger from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a leading expert in models of climate and ocean circulation, believes that even with these caveats, the NOC team has probably come up with a link to human-induced climate change.

"The variability question is the right one to ask," he told the BBC News website, "but the phasing is wrong."

A decade ago Professor Schlesinger showed that the north Atlantic conveyor undergoes a natural 70-year cycle of strengthening and weakening.

"The Bryden measurements are out of phase with this cycle," he said.

Models can predict variability, but we think we ought to go out and measure it

Harry Bryden

But climate is a complex phenomenon; other factors could conspire, even so, to produce a net warming.

"The UK government is looking, in terms of mitigating climate change and adapting to it, at a warming scenario," said Phil Newton of the UK's Natural Environment Research Council, which funds the Rapid investigators.

"You might now be asking what sort of mitigation and adaptation they should be looking for."

To answer this question, the Rapid team plans to continue their measurements in the next few years.

Their buoys remain in place, and ships can go to gather their data as often as finance allows.

The findings will have resonance beyond the shores of the UK and Europe, as extra heat left circulating around the tropical Atlantic could have major impacts on weather systems in Africa, the Caribbean and central America.

CLIMATE COLLAPSEThe Pentagon's Weather NightmareThe climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.By David Stipp

Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let's face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11.

Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined.

In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon's strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point.

Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decadelike a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over.

Scientists don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold.

But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future.

If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societiesthereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

Though triggered by warming, such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe.

Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust bowls and forests to ashes.

Picture last fall's California wildfires as a regular thing.

Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russiait's easy to see why the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.

Just a few years

Climate researchers began getting seriously concerned about it a decade ago, after studying temperature indicators embedded in ancient layers of Arctic ice.

The data show that a number of dramatic shifts in average temperature took place in the past with shocking speedin some cases, just a few years.

The case for angst was buttressed by a theory regarded as the most likely explanation for the abrupt changes.

The eastern U.S. and northern Europe, it seems, are warmed by a huge Atlantic Ocean current that flows north from the tropicsthat's why Britain, at Labrador's latitude, is relatively temperate.

Pumping out warm, moist air, this "great conveyor" current gets cooler and denser as it moves north.

That causes the current to sink in the North Atlantic, where it heads south again in the ocean depths.

The sinking process draws more water from the south, keeping the roughly circular current on the go.

But when the climate warms, according to the theory, fresh water from melting Arctic glaciers flows into the North Atlantic, lowering the current's salinityand its density and tendency to sink.

A warmer climate also increases rainfall and runoff into the current, further lowering its saltiness.

As a result, the conveyor loses its main motive force and can rapidly collapse, turning off the huge heat pump and altering the climate over much of the Northern Hemisphere.

Similar to today's global warming

Scientists aren't sure what caused the warming that triggered such collapses in the remote past.

(Clearly it wasn't humans and their factories.)

But the data from Arctic ice and other sources suggest the atmospheric changes that preceded earlier collapses were dismayingly similar to today's global warming.

As the Ice Age began drawing to a close about 13,000 years ago, for example, temperatures in Greenland rose to levels near those of recent decades.

Then they abruptly plunged as the conveyor apparently shut down, ushering in the "Younger Dryas" period, a 1,300-year reversion to ice-age conditions.

(A dryas is an Arctic flower that flourished in Europe at the time.)

Though Mother Nature caused past abrupt climate changes, the one that may be shaping up today probably has more to do with us.

In 2001 an international panel of climate experts concluded that there is increasingly strong evidence that most of the global warming observed over the past 50 years is attributable to human activitiesmainly the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which release heat-trapping carbon dioxide.

A few years ago such changes seemed signs of possible trouble for our kids or grandkids.

Today they seem portents of a cataclysm that may not conveniently wait until we're history.

Accordingly, the spotlight in climate research is shifting from gradual to rapid change.

In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that human activities could trigger abrupt change.

Last year the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications of possible abrupt climate change within two decades.

Hollywood has also discovered the issuenext summer 20th Century Fox is expected to release The Day After Tomorrow, a big-budget disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid as a scientist trying to save the world from an ice age precipitated by global warming.

Fox's flick will doubtless be apocalyptically edifying.

But what would abrupt climate change really be like?

CLIMATE COLLAPSE

Yoda

Scientists generally refuse to say much about that, citing a data deficit.

But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question.

A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda"  a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy.

Since 1973 he has headed a secretive think tank whose role is to envision future threats to national security.

The Department of Defense's push on ballistic-missile defense is known as his brainchild.

Three years ago Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld picked him to lead a sweeping review on military "transformation," the shift toward nimble forces and smart weapons.

When scientists' work on abrupt climate change popped onto his radar screen, Marshall tapped another eminent visionary, Peter Schwartz, to write a report on the national-security implications of the threat.

Schwartz formerly headed planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group and has since consulted with organizations ranging from the CIA to DreamWorkshe helped create futuristic scenarios for Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report.

Schwartz and co-author Doug Randall at the Monitor Group's Global Business Network, a scenario-planning think tank in Emeryville, Calif., contacted top climate experts and pushed them to talk about what-ifs that they usually shy away fromat least in public.

The result is an unclassified report, completed late last year, that the Pentagon has agreed to share with FORTUNE.

It doesn't pretend to be a forecast.

Rather, it sketches a dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about coping strategies.

Here is an abridged version:

Partial or full shutdown

A total shutdown of the ocean conveyor might lead to a big chill like the Younger Dryas, when icebergs appeared as far south as the coast of Portugal.

Or the conveyor might only temporarily slow down, potentially causing an era like the "Little Ice Age," a time of hard winters, violent storms, and droughts between 1300 and 1850.

That period's weather extremes caused horrific famines, but it was mild compared with the Younger Dryas.

For planning purposes, it makes sense to focus on a midrange case of abrupt change.

A century of cold, dry, windy weather across the Northern Hemisphere that suddenly came on 8,200 years ago fits the billits severity fell between that of the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age.

The event is thought to have been triggered by a conveyor collapse after a time of rising temperatures not unlike today's global warming.

Suppose it recurred, beginning in 2010.

Here are some of the things that might happen by 2020:

Massive droughts have begun

At first the changes are easily mistaken for normal weather variationallowing skeptics to dismiss them as a "blip" of little importance and leaving policymakers and the public paralyzed with uncertainty.

But by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening.

The average temperature has fallen by up to five degrees Fahrenheit in some regions of North America and Asia and up to six degrees in parts of Europe.

(By comparison, the average temperature over the North Atlantic during the last ice age was ten to 15 degrees lower than it is today.)

Massive droughts have begun in key agricultural regions.

The average annual rainfall has dropped by nearly 30% in northern Europe, and its climate has become more like Siberia's.

Violent storms are increasingly common as the conveyor becomes wobbly on its way to collapse.

A particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands, making coastal cities such as the Hague unlivable.

In California the delta island levees in the Sacramento River area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.

Widespread dust storms

Megadroughts afflict the U.S., especially in the southern states, along with winds that are 15% stronger on average than they are now, causing widespread dust storms and soil loss.

The U.S. is better positioned to cope than most nations, however, thanks to its diverse growing climates, wealth, technology, and abundant resources.

That has a downside, though: It magnifies the haves-vs.-have-nots gap and fosters bellicose finger-pointing at America.

Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources.

Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islandswaves of boat people pose especially grim problems.

Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico.

America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts.

Yet it survives without catastrophic losses.

Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south.

Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees from hard-hit countries in Africa and elsewhere.

But Western Europe's wealth helps buffer it from catastrophe.

Australia's size and resources help it cope, as does its locationthe conveyor shutdown mainly affects the Northern Hemisphere.

Japan has fewer resources but is able to draw on its social cohesion to copeits government is able to induce population-wide behavior changes to conserve resources.

Internal order

China's huge population and food demand make it particularly vulnerable.

It is hit by increasingly unpredictable monsoon rains, which cause devastating floods in drought-denuded areas.

Other parts of Asia and East Africa are similarly stressed.

Much of Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea level, which contaminates inland water supplies.

Countries whose diversity already produces conflict, such as India and Indonesia, are hard-pressed to maintain internal order while coping with the unfolding changes.

THE ERUPTION OF DESPERATE, ALL-OUT WARS OVER FOOD

Raiding

As the decade progresses, pressures to act become irresistiblehistory shows that whenever humans have faced a choice between starving or raiding, they raid.

Imagine Eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations, invading Russiawhich is weakened by a population that is already in declinefor access to its minerals and energy supplies.

Envision nuclear-armed Pakistan, India, and China skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land.

Or Spain and Portugal fighting over fishing rightsfisheries are disrupted around the world as water temperatures change, causing fish to migrate to new habitats.

Growing tensions engender novel alliances.

Canada joins fortress America in a North American bloc.

(Alternatively, Canada may seek to keep its abundant hydropower for itself, straining its ties with the energy-hungry U.S.)

North and South Korea align to create a technically savvy, nuclear-armed entity.

Europe forms a truly unified bloc to curb its immigration problems and protect against aggressors.

Russia, threatened by impoverished neighbors in dire straits, may join the European bloc.

Nuclear-weapons

Nuclear arms proliferation is inevitable.

Oil supplies are stretched thin as climate cooling drives up demand.

Many countries seek to shore up their energy supplies with nuclear energy, accelerating nuclear proliferation.

Japan, South Korea, and Germany develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt, and North Korea.

Israel, China, India, and Pakistan also are poised to use the bomb.

The changes relentlessly hammer the world's "carrying capacity"the natural resources, social organizations, and economic networks that support the population.

Technological progress and market forces, which have long helped boost Earth's carrying capacity, can do little to offset the crisisit is too widespread and unfolds too fast.

As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies.

As Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc has noted, wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago.

When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population's adult males usually died.

As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.

Inevitable

Over the past decade, data have accumulated suggesting that the plausibility of abrupt climate change is higher than most of the scientific community, and perhaps all of the political community, are prepared to accept.

In light of such findings, we should be asking when abrupt change will happen, what the impacts will be, and how we can preparenot whether it will really happen.

In fact, the climate record suggests that abrupt change is inevitable at some point, regardless of human activity.

Among other things, we should:

• Speed research on the forces that can trigger abrupt climate change, how it unfolds, and how we'll know it's occurring.

• Sponsor studies on the scenarios that might play out, including ecological, social, economic, and political fallout on key food-producing regions.

• Identify "no regrets" strategies to ensure reliable access to food and water and to ensure our national security.

• Form teams to prepare responses to possible massive migration, and food and water shortages.

• Explore ways to offset abrupt cooling—today it appears easier to warm than to cool the climate via human activities, so there may be "geo-engineering" options available to prevent a catastrophic temperature drop.

In sum, the risk of abrupt climate change remains uncertain, and it is quite possibly small.

But given its dire consequences, it should be elevated beyond a scientific debate.

Action now matters, because we may be able to reduce its likelihood of happening, and we can certainly be better prepared if it does.

It is time to recognize it as a national security concern.

Sea change in acceptance

The Pentagon's reaction to this sobering report isn't knownin keeping with his reputation for reticence, Andy Marshall declined to be interviewed.

But the fact that he's concerned may signal a sea change in the debate about global warming.

At least some federal thought leaders may be starting to perceive climate change less as a political annoyance and more as an issue demanding action.

If so, the case for acting now to address climate change, long a hard sell in Washington, may be gaining influential support, if only behind the scenes.

Policymakers may even be emboldened to take steps such as tightening fuel-economy standards for new passenger vehicles, a measure that would simultaneously lower emissions of greenhouse gases, reduce America's perilous reliance on OPEC oil, cut its trade deficit, and put money in consumers' pockets.

Oh, yesand give the Pentagon's fretful Yoda a little less to worry about.

 CANBERRA (Reuters) - Rising world temperatures could cause a significant increase in disease across Asia and Pacific Island nations, leading to conflict and leaving hundreds of millions of people displaced, a new report said on Thursday.

Global warming by the year 2100 could also lead to more droughts, floods and typhoons, and increase the incidence of malaria, dengue fever and cholera, the report into the health impact of rising temperatures found.

Compiled by the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Australian Conservation Foundation, the country's leading medical and environment groups, the study predicts average temperatures will rise by between 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) and 6 degrees by 2100.

"We're not just talking about a longer summer or a shorter ski season," AMA president Mukesh Haikerwal told reporters.

"Climate change will damage our health. People will get sick as a direct result. People will die in larger numbers as our earth, our world, our home, heats up."

In Australia, Haikerwal said up to 15,000 people could die each year due to heat stress by 2100, up from about 1,000 a year at present, while dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases could spread as far south as Sydney.

Dengue fever in Australia is currently confined to the country's tropical and sparsely populated far north.

Internationally, higher world temperatures would increase the incidence of violent storms and droughts, and could lead to crop failures which could cause political and social upheaval.

"As stresses increase there is likely to be a shift toward authoritarian governments," the report said.

"At the worst case, large scale state failure and major conflict may generate hundreds of millions of displaced people in the Asia-Pacific region, a widespread collapse of law, and numerous abuses of human rights."

The report said crop yields were likely to increase in parts of Northern Asia, but would decrease in countries in Southern Asia, where the incidence of floods, droughts, forest fires and tropical cyclones would all increase.